FoodMan

Other than the extended cooking time and the bunch of herbs added at the end, yes I made it as written. This is my favortie caponata recipe and I usually go back to it whenever I need to make some. IMHO it is not too sweet. Make sure to use the cocoa powder, I think it is essential, maybe even add a little more than requested.

First off, a warm BIG Congrats to ITALY the new World Cup champions. It really was a fun game. Lovely pasta Chufi. Looks like you have some nice fava beans. How was that octopus eaten. plain? wih sauce? To go with the game I of course made some lovely Sicilian food, nothing too fussy though, more like perfect game watching-no-silverware-needed food. The day before I made and formed some Pane Siciliano from Reinhart's "The Breadbaker's Apprentice". this was baked this morning. I also cooked up some eggplant caponata based on Mario's recipe from "simple Italian food". Since my herbs in the garden are doing exceedingly well due to the current two weeks of rain, I took a page from Jamie Oliver and finished my caponata with loadsa herbs (basil, mint, oregano). Served the caponata on sliced toasted pane Siciliano and topped it with Ricotta Salata. BTW, many cookbook authors including Mario here either like their eggplant undercooked or are simply wrong aboput the timing. There is no way eggplant will cook in 5 or 10 minutes, and undecooked eggplant is nasty. I cooked this nice and long. I love the jammy texture it gets. I also made the Sicilian Farmer's Bruschetta from "Italian Country Table" using the same bread and freshly made creamy ricotta cheese. Oh, yeah, the tomatoes are also from the garden. Dolci was watermelon pudding from Clifford Wright's "Cucina Paradiso" . This was so good and refreshing I actually ate two of them. It is so Arabic in flavor that it is surprising I've never eaten it in Lebanon with it's rosewater cinnamon and psitachios. Well the chocolate chips are not Arabic, but hey that's just one ingredient.

Thanks for the advice folks. The pepperone are tighlty wrapped in the freezer. I am sure they will be more than acceptable as topping/filling for baked goods and such. I used pork casings BTW.

See with Pancetta, I'm ok if it is not dry cured. I made it a couple of times and rolled it and let it dry in the fridge for only a couple of days, then in the freezer it went. I have a whole roll in there now. It is meant to be cooked and eaten anyways, so I do not fuss too much with getting it dry-cured. Salami, peperone, chorizo and their buddies are a different story since they need that perfect dry texture to be eaten raw.

Just to verify my doubts about not being able to make proper cured sausages in Houston without a curing chamber, I made ahalf batch of Peperone. I hung it in my extra refrigerator in the garage. The problem is, we actually need to use that fridge for normal uses, so it is not just for curing. The temperature and humidity are both lower than ideal. This resulted in a peperone that is dried on the outside and still "mushy" in the center . It does taste great though. So what can I do with it? slice and cook on pizza and such? In the meantime I am sticking with stuff that does not require dry curing (bacon in all its guises, smoked/fresh sausages, terrines...).

That's what I do, form a log about 4 or 5 inches long and maybe 3/4 inch diameter and then skewer it from end to end. Works best for me. Although this is not the "traditional" way of making it, my grandmother would simply form it on the skewer, but then again she is a better cook that I

Chile flakes probably. The pesto is: Almonds Pistachios pinenuts All nuts roasted mint leaves Chile flakes salt pepper olive oil Granita could not be easier, 3 cups espresso and 1 Cup sugar. That's all.

looks outstanding Chef Crash! I never managed to perfect mine to be as good as yours looks, especially the crust. I'll have to give it a try now. In Tripoli and everywhere I've been in Beirut, the shredded phylo one is not called Kenafi, but Basma. Also, and this is sort of an inside joke in Tripoli, how do you know if someone is from Beirut Vs. the North (ie north of Tripoli)? You ask if they want Kenafi with cheese (bil Jibin) or with clotted cream (bil Ashta). The Beirutis will always pick the cheese one, the Northerners will pick the Ashta. Needless to say Ashta is my favorite, but I'll take the cheese version in kaak anytime.

Jscarbor, Blanco's is right around the corner from our friends apartment. I never fail to eat breakfast there at least once when in SA. I love their tacos, but I'll give Chile con Carne a try next time around. maxwellh, you managed to sum up in one paragraph what took me like two pages to vent off. .

Or maybe it is Messina I'm thinking of, yes the ones who eat it on brioche. I've done that before, but I had not time or forthought to bake brioche this time around. Why isen't the Asparagus Sicilian? If a Sicilian had good asparagus, a simple olive oil and lemon juice dressing might be all he (or she) would do. ok, maybe grill it first over hard wood...and skewer it with anchovies and sprinkle some Pantelleria capers on it...

here is my first Sicilian meal from Sunday. Started of with Spaghetti with Almond-Pistachio Pesto from Italian Country Table. It has no cheese of any kind, just nuts, mint and olive oil. A very good combination and perfect summery pasta The pesto in my "authentic" mortar finished dish The Secondo was a fresh gulf Red snapper baked in a salt crust. The fish was impeccably fresh and I stuffed it with some orange and lemon slices and herbs. This has to be one of the best ways to cook whole fish, reults in the juiciest most flavorful meat ever. On the side I served my take on a Sicilian potato salad. Basically boiled poatoes dressed with vinegar-sugar simmered onions and raisins, a good dose of olive oil of course. It actually was a very good combination. I also made Orange-Endive salad. PRetty and excellent as well. this recipe minus the endive is from Cucina Paradiso For dessert we had Espresso Granita topped with Grand Marnier spiked whipped cream. It really does not get any easier than that and the final result is a perfect summery dessert. Had more of that the next day for breakfast like they do in Palermo, or so I heard. Later that same night, ice cold Fraguledda.

Finally, Sicily. I've never been there but this is undoubtedly one of my favorite regions. I doubt we will have trouble finding stuff to cook this month. The problem is actually finding the time and space to cook so many recipes and sweets. My Italian/Sicilian liquerus sure are ready for an after dinner sip. Here is what I have so far: from left to right; green walnut (Nocino); wild strawberry (Fraguledda), actually I used a mixture of berries here due to the lack of the real thing with delicious results; Limoncello; and an Amaretto like liqueur of roasted almonds, insipid color I know, but tastes outstanding. I also have Alkermes, but that is most certainly Florentine...so we'll leave it to another month

For purely Tex-Mex I think Gringo's makes good food for reasonable prices. For more on the border of Mexican/Tex-Mex I really like Pico's on Bellaire. Their Chile Relleno and Cochinita Pibil are excellent.

I've never seen the build a pizza oven in your garage approach! That is nuts. I do however run my oven through a cleaning cycle with bricks in it (actually the bottom is always layered with bricks), I stop the cycle midway through and then bake my pizza. The best pizza crust outside of Napoli IMHO.

Your Laban (yogurt) sounds way too thin, try my recipe here. It never fails me. For Labneh see this recipe. To make it into balls, make sure it is very well drained and mix in whatever flavoring you want, place in jar and cover with oil. I personally alwasy eat it fresh with salt, a drizzle of olive oil and some olives.

Possibly, at 3Am there isen't much else. But why that place is packed at dinner time is still a mystery to me. The food is not ok, not mediocre, not acceptable, it's downright bad.

Lovely dish Chufi. I love much smaller zucchini for stuffing. I never knew what club steak was either, Wikipedia seems to think it is the same as Delmonico steak and defines it as "The original Delmonico steak, is considered to be a boneless top sirloin that is almost 2 inches thick with delicate marbling". So a good sirloin should do. Hope this helps

Hey, busy people, where's the Sicily thread? I already have stuff to post.

I make kebabs all the time with ground beef or lamb and I never use a binder. I really am not sure how to help you without seeing your technique. I normally form it in to sausage shaped logs, and insert a wooden or bambo skewer from one end to the other then press it all around gently to make sure it adheres. I never had a problem with it falling off, since as soon as it cooks it contracts and firms up. Maybe u used too much fat?? what was your recipe? In a muslim country one would use caul fat from a calf or lamb BTW, although I've never seen it used to wrap around a kebab.

Website for Mi Tierra: http://www.mitierracafe.com/default.html I should’ve begged to leave this place when the first impression that came to mind upon arriving is “Holy crap! This is the Walmart of restaurants!!.” Let me backtrack a bit. On a recent visit to a friend of ours in San Antonio we were trying to decide where to go eat after a long day. Everyone was hungry and we knew we will probably end up at a Mexican or Tex-Mex joint, God knows there are many very good choices in San Antonio for that sort of eating. My only request? Please, please do not take me to that dreadful tourist trap on the river called the “Blue (or is it Green) Iguana”. So, our friends agreed not to go there and asked us to follow them somewhere else. That’s how we ended up at “Mi Tierra”. When I saw it from a distance across from the Market, I was hopeful. I could’ve sworn I heard very good things about it. Did Robb Walsh mention it in his Tex-Mex cookbook as well? When we got closer I noticed tons of people sitting/standing/walking outside its doors sipping drinks. I mean like 50 or so people. Surely they are not all waiting for tables. Wrong, they are! As soon as we walk in my heart sinks and the Walmart-likeness of this joint sets in. The place has a large bakery as well with a long line of displayed baked goods. Also, I could not believe my eyes for a sec, it has large neon lit signs with arrows pointing to the hostess stations saying “REGISTER HERE”. I have never seen anything like it. So we stand in the first line to “REGISTER”. Ten minutes later we have a cool number and are told to wait for an hour and a half while watching the electronic number displays, you know like the ones they have at the Social Security or DPS offices, for our number to pop up. It is worth mentioning that the place is packed, buzzing, chock full of people. No, not just gringo tourists, but native San Antonio-nites, including large families, youngsters on dates, and good looking young women with their girlfriends. So, I thought, the food must be worth the wait, it’s not just a tourist trap. Starved, tired and impatient, we waited and waited, and sipped a couple of margaritas, and watched people come and go. When our lucky number came up, we followed a curt hostess who walked us all the way to the end of the Mexico-city-center like dining hall, it sure was big enough to be a small town, to our table. I looked on the menu, and my worst fears were confirmed, this is touristy, easy to prepare before hand and nuke, below average even for a Tex-Mex place menu. Even the combination plates were underachievers with no more than a tamale, a cheese enchilada and a crispy taco. Oh, they could add a strip of grilled “rib eye” to it as well. We started off with a chile con queso, not bad, but it’s difficult to fuck up melted Velveeta. For my dinner I went with a battered, stuffed and fried Poblano pepper AKA Chile Relleno. I love this dish when well prepared (like at Pico’s in Houston) and because the sometimes-here-sometimes-not waiter gave it high praise. The beauty of a Chile Relleno is in a nice crispy batter, tender roasted pepper and spicy flavorful picadillo filling, all topped with hot red sauce. Mi Tierra’s version was damn awful, soggy crust, rubbery and a little bitter pepper (not sure how they did this), and lukewarm filling and sauce. Even the 2 or 3 tablespoons of “Spanish rice” were barely edible and clumpy. The best thing on the plate was the other 2 or 3 tablespoons of refried beans. My wife’s dish was not much better, she got some combo plate or another, the crispy taco was anything but crispy and she ended up eating the filling. Her cheese enchilada was filled, as far as I could taste, with sharp cheddar cheese. Screwing up a cheese enchilada at a Tex-Mex place is almost as difficult as screwing up the Chile con Queso. However, the “chef” at Mi Tierra managed to do that and using sharp cheddar cheese that turns hard and rubbery with an undercurrent of bitterness is a sure way to do that. Wrap the whole thing in a stale hard corn tortilla and the deal is sealed. The worst cheese enchilada I’ve ever tasted, including the microwave versions. Mi Tierra cooks need to read Walsh’s book on how to make a real cheese enchilada. Walking out of the place, passing through the dining halls, I looked at the hundreds of people at this place and wondered what the hell is wrong with them. What do they see in this place that we don’t? I wouldn’t eat here if they paid me again. I guess next time we are in SA, I have two places I need to beg not to go to. Back in Houston I ask a friend of mine who used to go to SA frequently about Mi Tierra. He says, it’s a good after-hours place (ie after getting hammered and your taste buds are numb) and also a good place to meet women . Then he thinks and says, “but you know what, San Antonio people love it. Almost anyone who lives there will tell you it’s good. I have no idea why.” For the life of me, in a city with tons of excellent Mexican and Tex-Mex restaurants, I have no idea why either. Am I missing anything?????

but you can mill so many things in the miller Actually he also breaks the rule using his bean frencher. I think the "non-unitasker" is his ideal, but it is not attainable.

Corinna, this really looks pretty awsome, I love the "crust" around the edge. I bet the contrast in texture was nice indeed.

Ling- These photos are one of the best we've seen here. Everything looks great! Kevin- I love your demo of the carta de musica...and I thought you said you cannot bake ... I've been quiet the slacker this month. Not sure why. I guess I'm saving up for the divine Sicily, with so many options to cook from! I sure hope to put in one more contribution from Sardinia still before this week is over. Favorite region so far: Lazio (Rome) and I really loved Liguria and it's cooking, so surprisingly simple and good.

After the closing of Aries and the opening of Pic, Robb Walsh had a phone conversation with Tycer, check it out here Many reasons were cited for the move, but IMHO it all boils down to money. Seems like Pic is aiming more for the T'afia crowd honestly. It does sound like a coold place to check out.

Just bottled my double batch of Red ale yesterday (looks more like brown to me though). I think it is perfect this time, smelled great and tasted very nice with good hop and floral tastes. I actually put a half a cup or so of the beer in the fridge and tasted it again to make sure it tastes perfectly fine. I do have to admit that I HATE siphoning though, HATE it. It never seems to work 100%, I ended up just gently pouring in the last gallon or so into the second bucket where it was being primed.